July Jobs…

As another month comes to an end, I decide to do my usual thing of recounting what I did in the last 30 days. I do this partly so that you can see all the cool people I write for and partly so that I don’t feel I’m wasting my life just because I spend at least 90 per cent of my time sat in the same chair.

That sounded a lot darker and more self-pitying than I meant it to. Sorry.

So, other than the usual Twitter arguments, what have I done this month? Believe it or not, it’s not all just limited to journalism this time, as one of the games I worked on this year is now inching toward release…

I’ll be writing more about the game in the future – and as it’s yet to be approved by Apple, I don’t want to say too much – but I think I can safely reveal a little at this point. I can say that it is a mobile adaptation of a popular American boardgame and that I worked on it as a Product Manager and Design Consultant on it, for example.

That meant my role was helping sort the good ideas from the bad, designing the modes and scoring system, writing content and documentation and assisting with QA too. All this was done in an AGILE framework on a small team of under ten people – ten awesome people. I was involved with the project from the start after having designed and built a few other mobile projects for Bizarre Magazine and The Fortean Times.

As I said though, I’ll likely write more about that game in the future, as well as the other independent title I’m working on. My role is very different on the second game; I’m the Narrative Designer and Lead Writer.

Speaking of which, I also got out to my first IGDA Writers Night, finally meeting the wonderful Ed Stern and Tom Jubert, as well as more familiar faces like James Swallow. Nights like that are why I love my job.

Journalism-wise though it was a deceptively quiet month for me as, while I did do some exciting new pieces, some haven’t yet been published. For now, I’ll just have to say that I’ll be in the next issue of the excellent Continue Magazine, as well on Eurogamer in the hopefully near future.

There was also the Unlimited Hyperbole podcast, which is currently coming up to the end of the second season and will shortly begin preparing for the third. We don’t really care about traffic or stats for that project, but all the feedback Harriet and I have been getting indicates it’s going down really well, so we’re chuffed about that.

On the topic of audio, I also guested on BBC Radio5 for the Game On! show again this month, talking with Christian Donlan, Adam Rosser and Nath Grayson about such games as The Secret World and Spelunky. I always enjoy doing that show, which operates way more slickly than any of my own podcast stuff.

Finally, I also managed to get down to Brighton for Rezzed where I met lots of lovely people and had an idea which eventually became an article about Half-Life 2’s cut content for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I was very happy with the name of that piece.